The finnish citizen: a reserved person

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.main##

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.sidebar##

Published 21-02-2012
Henrik Stenius

Abstract

When Finland became a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire the elite was Swedish speaking. However, the victorious Finnish language movement from 1840s to the turn of the century, succeeded to change the Finnish language from bring a language of the peasantry, into a language used in higher administration, academia and the arts. Creating a Finnish political language had to take into con sideration Finland's relation to Russian interests as well as to the Swedish cultural and institutional heritage. In this article the process will be illustrated by focusing on a translation of a judicial key text, written in Swedish in the 1850s and trans lated into Finnish 1863, or more precisely, the translation of just one concept, the concept of «citizen» in this text. By using a couple of neologisms and different sorts of circumlocutions, the translator created an original conceptual framework for the discourse of citizenship with a radically universalistic, but at the same time completely apolitical concept of citizenship at its core.

Abstract 226 | PDF (Español) Downloads 880

##plugins.themes.bootstrap3.article.details##

Section
Bibliographical Essay